JoergWausW

Ok, maybe I wasn't clear enough. Nobody is sending spam using my actual email account anymore - I changed the password immediately. They can still fake the sender's email address (as in real life everyone can write a letter and put their neighbor's address as sender info on the envelope), but this is not what I'm talking about here: This is how Groundspeak's Service works, as far as I understand: 1) You get a notification email about a new message in your email programm. 2) You hit "reply to this email" in your email programm. 3) Your write your answer with your email programm and hit "send". 4) Your message appears in the message center with correct sender and recipient. In step 3) your email is sent to an email address at Groundspeak/geocaching.com. The user name of this email address is a code that contains information about sender and recipient. This coded email address was stolen during the hacking of my email account. The spammers are now mailing spam to this address. To do this they don't need any access to anything that is related to me or the other cacher I was in contact with. The Groundspeak server interprets the spammers' email address and routes the message to the sender/recipient combination it was created for, and voilá it appears in the message center. If these spammers' emails were carefully checked whether they were really sent by my email account, it wouldn't happen. Shutting down my email account would not help, because the spammers will continue using this coded email address as long as they are in their evil spammer business...

The notification email for new messages can be answered directly from your email-program. Sadly, I did this a couple times, instead of opening the message center in the browser. Problem is: Sadly, my email account was hacked some time ago, and - next to a lot more others - some email addresses that were created to answer to the message center are used now to send spam. This spam now shows up in the message center in my geocaching account, and, of course, in the accounts of those people I used the reply by email feature with. They even get a notification email with a copy of the spam included - resulting in spam "provided" by geocaching.com... and I didn't even send it - plus I'm not aware of it as long as I don't open my message center in the browser. So I'm looking for a solution that this spam stops. Is it possible to disable those specific message center email addresses from working? I would not have a problem communicating to the affected people browser only or app only, because I hardly ever used the reply to email option at all... (or is this email address used in the app?) (yes, I know that it was not a good idea to be hacked. I must have used the same password for some internet service that I also used for my email account - this some-service was hacked, and the evil guys got my account-password combination... I'll never know what service that was... )

Insteresting fact: before starting to write this post, the latest Geocache-Code that was ordered is GC74HVR, in decimal: 6189858. This means, there are MORE archived and/or yet unpublished caches than active ones.

To see the original cachingplace.com-site try this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20071107112447/http://www.thecachingplace.com/ at the left you can click the decypher coin you want to look at.

The 2003 Oregon Geocoin is not trackable on Groundspeak.com and never was. If it is still trackable somewhere else? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't look like it is. Older thread about this coin: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=153673 But maybe someone made them trackable by somehow attaching a Groundspeak-Code to them?

I don't have this kind of money. But a solution for your non-sellable coin could be this: Whoever buys the whole collection without these Unsellables for your fixed price ($10 each?), gets them as a free bonus.

I know, but sometimes I don't know yet which TB I will drop in a cache the same day just before the event. Sometimes the TB has a special mission and I don't know whether I'll find someone who can help the TB. I don't like to drop stuff for the event owner to sit on afterwards... But you may be right about the problem - my method of grabbing it back means more work for the grabber, because he(or she) has to retrieve it online again before it can be dropped online. If they had waited the only had to do it once. On the other hand: you don't know whether they would do it a second time. Maybe they don't care and put it in a cache/event without the proper online-log because they don't have it in their inventory anymore. But same might happen after I email them and tell them: nothing.

I think I never got any email telling me that someone grabbed an item from my inventory. They're just gone when I'm about to drop them into the event I just attended. Why can that be? An observation: Usually those "grabby people" don't drop them into the event where they got the item for you, so the information where it changed holdership is lost. If I still have the tracking code, I'll grab it back and drop it into the event. The current holder gets (probably) the email and can grab it again. But sometimes I don't have the code anymore. A suggestion: Maybe futile because it is already realized (as I said I never got one of those notification mails): is the tracking code included in these grab-mails? I guess the log text of the grabber already is.

Just to clarify, not to poke further: I know the difference, but I remember there were coins that said GCC on them but were probably not in the subscription, like those poker challenge coins from 2007 or 2008, or those "I cought me a bug" tag-shaped coins from GW V - I guess only 50 made, that said "www.geocoinclub.com" on them... I don't know how you could get those, but probably not through the geocoinstore - seems more club-related. --- Good luck!

... and maybe you should ask if it comes with all the limited editions/artist editions - Not every coin had one, but more than a few. I guess that every club member who joined the club in the beginning owns a complete set of regular editions (and the club owners themselves probably, too)... if I'm not wrong, every member got two regular ones each. ...and what about the other GCC coins e.g. minted for Mega-Events or other purposes? These are "GCC coins" as well... ...and I doubt that the first regular editions were super rare - I guess they are hard to find, because a lot of them were lost/muggled (a lot were set free back then) or remained with people who are not in the game anymore - unless you were talking about the AEs... those ARE rare. ...is the donation from GCC or from an individual that happens to have them all? To answer the initial question: I think the main idea of the donor is to offer the complete set... I guess it is almost 150 regular coins we are talking about. I think you'll get more money by splitting the collection up - I doubt the complete set will sell for more than the sum of the parts. Especially the rare ones will go up in price while you probably will sit on the latest ones for a while. On the other hand: If you are a non-profit organization - in case you don't really need the profit of selling them: Why not activate them and put them on display? Take them to events, keep the collection complete... maybe people donate more money over time or even join MIGO, because they appreciate a collection like this to remain intact and for everyone to enjoy?

I assume most of those chair-logged coins have a PC prefix. I guess that about a third of all exisiting PC-codes are activated. If you enter any random PCxxxx-Code, in average, every third is getting you to an activated coin. I estimate, if you wanted to, this way you could discover like 3-4 coins every minute, that is about 200 per hour. If 20% of those logs got deleted in the end - why care? Problem: Groundspeak used the PC-prefix way too long. With other prefixes you have a lower chance of finding an activated coin. Good thing: There are enough codes left to be given away, because less than 1% of these 1,2 billion codes is used so far. If all those codes had been used randomly from the very beginning, your random chances would be as little, meaning you might only find and log an activated item every 3 minutes. That would be only 20 per hour and way more boring. As I suggested before: Why not introduce a button "discover all coins" into the game, that will put this player's counter to 1,196,883,216 logged coins (that's the number of possible 6-digit-codes I guess, add the number of codes with less digits), spare the coin owners the logs and everyone should be really happy saving a lot of time.

My 2 geocents: A real museum where people can stroll through won't happen. Too expensive to maintain and to run, too little interest. The closest you can get to a huge collection of phyical coins is a Geocoinfest. Sellers, resellers and collectors bring (parts of) their collection and put it on display for one day at one location. But you should know that some people just bring a list of tracking codes, because it's less heavy to carry around... Every collector owns a bigger or smaller collection - but I guess the more items the collection holds, the less information for each coin (in average) can be provided (no offense intented!), due to the time that is needed to get hold of all the information and edit it properly. If you go through profile pages of collectors with huge collections - most of them don't put a single picture on any coin's page. I'd think this applies to information as well. Some people with smaller collections tend to copy-paste shop's information and shop's pictures - a few take own pictures and tell the personal story of their item, but usually not about the genesis of the coin. Best source for first hand information of old coins prbably is this forum here - ideas for coins were discussed, orders taken, successes shared, delivery problems argued and much more. But you have to put the picture together for yourself by reading a lot of posts. These days a lot of coins are released through stores and too many webpages to keep an eye on everything. And a lot of these information vanish over time when websites go offline or stores delete their archives. If you're looking for an online geocoin catalogue - there were/are several webpages that started, and had/have different success, and quality of provided information varies a lot and is far from complete everywhere. I was interested in coins but knew from the start (in 2006) I knew that I won't be able to afford it in the long run. Today I own like 50 trackable items myself - most of them I got as a gift or I bought them as a souvenir of events or people I like. But I'm interested enough that I started to collect information about coins and put it in my own database. Someone recently said I was a digital collector... To cover everything about geocoins I guess these numbers can give you a clou of what is necessary, based on what I researched so far: - right now Groundspeak hosts >9000 entries on the All_Geocoins-Tab, and this page loads forever on my computer. If you would be able to discover every icon (including every line with a standard icon) your "trackables" page would have about 9000 rows. - some of those icons are shared by several coins, some coins' editions are spread over several icons. Including non-trackable geocoins I think it's save to say that there are >10,000 different designs in existence, including tags... - more than just a few of these icons cover coins with mintages <100 items - information about those are hard to find, as well as pictures. - there is an average of about 3 editions per coin. -> to own everything, by today you want to own >30,000 items (price $10 or more each, and if you'd spend 10 minutes gathering information for each design - do the math, too). To cover the topic "geocoins" completely like in a museum, you need resources... or you have to narrow it down to part of it.

My first guess was this: for example, the owner has a gold and a silver coin. If you enter the # of the gold coin the description/photo tells you it's the silver one and vice versa. That seems to happen sometimes if people just activate too much at once. But this is a problem the coin owner can fix. Second guesses: - there was at least one mint of the 2005 puzzle coins where the orange and green coins were assigned to the wrong icons (some people successfully aked Groundspeak to switch that, but most owners didn't - probably because they didn't notice) - geocoinshop.de failed with their Yin-Yang- coins at least in one mint (icons switched), and most Germany-Coins are spread over several different icons as well. - if we are talking about a Red Remembrance Poppies coin - there is a lot of chaos and confusion about the icons going on. - if I remember correctly, there was a coin mentioned in the forums once where the mint made an error and printed the TB-# on the coins, and Groundspeak actually made tracking codes out of them... - few people upload a picture of a coin that shows another coin's tracking code on it. Others put the TB-code on their photo where the code is supposed to be.

Finally I tried this and it seems to work pretty well. I have one problem though: my Caching under the Stars Geocoin from 2006 has a lot of polished silver on its front side, and I didn't manage to get rid of darker lines coming from reflections of the container's ireegular shape on the picture. Tilting the container made those lines turn. Can you see the brighter horizontal line between those brownish areas? That's parallel to the handle of the container I'm using. As you can see I printed out a paper with a black area so I can gimp the picture with black balance and white balance. That seems to be necessary - because the picture taken is a little dark all over. My solution was to put the whole container sideways, because the sides of it are plane (no handels or other irregualities). Only disadvantage: I have to take the picture in a lower angle, so you see more of the edge of the coin and it's not a circle anymore... Underneath the coin you can see the edge of the container and my paper. After using Gimp's balancing feature it looks like this: I guess I need a little more light in general to get rid of the 'crumbled' colors at the top of the picture in the first place... Any other suggestions how to get rid of those dark/bright lines in the first picture?

The tracking code should start with OC - that limits it to only about 923.521 possible codes. Maybe one of the previous holders still has the code? Try contacting one of these cachers. Especially the latest discoverers might have written it down somewhere...

Some Google search: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=138303 and http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=140249 Read both...

Excuse me, I didn't want to appear inapproriate. I did some research on your offer and came up with a question and a statement. Let me reduce it to this: 1) Question: Are you offering activated or unactivated coins? 2) Statement: I am (and that's a fact) impressed, that >$300 seems to be a good price to ask for an activated one-of-a-kind. Thank you.

You don't mention whether your coins are activated or not. In your profile I can see 5 activated coins of this kind, one of them is, in fact, the one-of-a-kind (coin page). Since a set of 4 unactivated coins didn't sell on the e-place for $75+shipping (link), I have to assume, the activated sample coin must be worth >300$. Wow!

If they never had started with prefixes but used 6 random digits this whole "we guess your code" stuff would be not happening the way it is today, because a guess would be statistically rare. But when 33% of all PC-prefix codes are activated, every third guess is a hit... There's even a German guy who seems to try all UN-prefixes to discover the 20,000 Unite For Diabetes TBs and 5,000 coins. Nobody cares to delete those logs, because they are all activated by a promotional account. And the counter goes up and up. Same thing is possible with the Jeeps. I'm still in favor of a button where you can chose to "virtually discover all trackables". Your counter goes up to 6,500,000 discovered trackables, no actual logs entries are created, no emails sent, all icons shown in profile, and everyone could be happy. People who like to log what they really had in hand could still do their game.... "People" don't read the goals or messages on coin pages because I guess they use programs that automatically log for them - so they never see the actual coin pages... (and some people log caches as found (and they never saw), too)

I just thought what happened with this thread. Probably I found the solution, but I'm not ready to create a new puzzle... So here's a hint (if I'm right): it's an avroair designed coin from 2008, current editions are still available.

When I tried to figure out about these two coins I came across this thread where the chicks were called to participate: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=164694 It looks like there were over 40 versions. Obviously the guys did their male "frog prince" version, but I didn't find a thread about it. So far I knew about 7 editions (2xDresselDragons, Hogwild SBD, Team Maddog, Team Sand Dollar and Team Shydog, avroair). This version in this thread is number 8.

For my (so far private) database I collected data in July 2014 when only 5724 codes were registered for this coin. So since then, 600 coins more came out (they are sold in different stores world wide right now). Back then I found out about 8 editions (5, maybe 6 of them are in the wiki - and two or 3 editions listed in the wiki I couldn't find, probably because they were minted later as part of the 600 coins made since then) What I can tell: numbers are hard to find out, because people tend to mention on their coin page what edition they have - but they upload a different picture that looks more or less similar (like: picture looks golden, but text says copper). I put down LE250 for your version into my db, but this probably is not accurate - looking at my research again today. This version was minted pretty early (I found a picture here: http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=1293768 ) - this one was activated 2007. Whether it was ever re-reminted, I don't know for sure. There are coin pages where owners write copper as metal but they don't mention the coloring, and/or they post pictures with a different metal. I assumed it was the same version in a remint (because usually, collectors who buy both versions and activate them both, tend to give different names and I could not find any hint of that). If it wasn't reminted, there would be less than 250. If they reminted this edition after 2013/14, there might be more. (but it's not very likely, because the shop didn't have it in the bunch lately: http://www.geoswag.com/dragon-spinner-5-pack.html - I guess those are part of the 600 newer ones, and there are golden ones in other shops). Too bad archive.org has a gap in geoswag-shop-history in January 2007 - if it even was ever sold in the online-store back then. And I couldn't find any selling-advertisement in this forum either (only some pictures of early artwork). Gridlox sold some AE in 2015 and advertised this here - maybe he knows what was minted of his design. So I would go for 250 as an estimate. But remember: It's not all about the numbers.

can't edit the old one... so I have to make a new one (and bump this thread) just found another one from 2008: Route 66 California http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=2122489 Front: Route 66 sign, Back: "Eureka!", Map, Bear

I'm not from California, nor am I an expert. But I don't get your message here, capsai. You don't want a 10 year old coin, I understand that. But parts of your suggested coin design I have seen before: http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=febfb0dd-991c-47e2-a6b4-32fa69601641 (bear and outline of california - coin from 2007) https://www.geocaching.com/track/gallery.aspx?ID=227853 (Drawing of Golden Gate Bridge - coin from 2005) Do you really want to copy ideas that are 10 years old? Does not look like "a fresh coin" to me at all. Would it sell? It rather looks like you give a reason why people didn't make newer coins about California: because there is not much more to experience than one bridge and a bear walking across a map. Please, please, disprove that. And here some more recent stuff I found about California (according to the coin title): (2012) www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=4218814 (2015) http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=55333868-97b8-46a8-a805-845b74fb5559 and there is a "Lassen County California Geocoin 2015", but I couldn't find any good pictures of it.

Someone wrote me a message asking whether he could log my cache that he couldn't find - he was even there with two others who were the cache's last finders, just a week before. He even sent me a picture of the empty place where the magnetic keyholder was supposed to be. I checked on the cache location and the container was lying in some leaves, less than 20 inches (50 cm) away, logbook completely dry and sound. I wrote back that I expected three DNF now... and learnt that not everything is couch logged, even today. Back to topic: Latest "trick" to improve the number of logged trackables seems to be to randomly enter UNxxxx- or JPxxxx-tracking codes and log those when finding an activated Diabetes TB or Jeep. In these cases the 'owners' don't care, so there are >35,000 potential logs. And suddenly those items are found again after a long time (some of them the first time...).